فصل 16

XVI

ON “ N O N- S T O P, “

both THE SONG and THE WAY of LIFE , as Manifest by

ANDY BLANKENBUEHLER AND THE PUBLIC THEATER’S PROPS DEPARTMENT

S i x y e a r s a f t e r l i n r e a d r o n Chernow’s book, five years after he rapped at the White House, the Hamilton team had only eight working days left to get the show ready for its first audience. They knew it wasn’t enough time.

Hamilton was one of the most complex productions ever staged in the Newman Theater, the Public’s 290-seat proscenium space. Those eight days in January 2015 were spent doing technical rehearsals–“tech,” for short–in which the actors worked through the show onstage, a few seconds at a time, so that every sound level, lighting cue, and movement choice could be tested and tweaked.

There was a lot to test and tweak.

“Thirteen-hundred cues,” said James Latus, the production stage manager for the downtown run, leafing through his heavily marked-up script, sounding like a man paddling across the Atlantic.

Tech is grueling under the best of circumstances, these were not the best of circumstances: 12-hour days, heavy woolen costumes, an overhead grid bristling with hot lights. In the dark audience, James and the designers sat at folding tables loaded with laptops, consoles, and assorted abstruse gear. It looked like Mission Control, if NASA’s business was launching rockets full of rapping multiracial actors in colonial garb into space.

For the most part, Lin behaved like any other member of the cast, goofing around, singing cartoon theme songs, trying to keep himself and everybody else sane. Lac was out of sight (he and the band were offstage left, in a loft musicians’ charts.

Tommy kept making circuits around the tables in the audience, checking in with the designers, giving feedback. He didn’t stray from what he wears almost every day: an untucked button-down shirt and jeans. He said that he saves his decision-making energy for the choices that count. Those choices came at him all day long.

“Thirteen hundred cues . . .” eight days became seven and then six. Daily, hourly, the show’s ambitions were put to the test. All the ideas that had sounded so good in production meetings, or had looked so promising in the rehearsal room, had to survive the proving ground of the actual stage. Everything had to add up to form a complete, coherent reality.

For Tommy, the brushwork mattered as much as the broad strokes. “It was really important, in a world where we didn’t have roofs and walls, that the props and clothing were going to root us in time. Especially because of the contemporary language.”

Much of the finest brushwork fell to Jay Duckworth, the prop master of the Public, and his colleagues Sara Swanberg and Sydney Schatz. They found or built objects of every size and description that actors carried on David Korins’s set. They carried verisimilitude as far it could go, which turns out to be very, very far.

During the “Yorktown” sequence, when Washington consults Comte de Rochambeau’s map, Chris Jackson looks at Rochambeau’s actual map, reproduced on parchment paper treated with Mod Podge, so it resembles sheepskin.

Newspapers figure in several places during the show, and each one includes stories that ran in actual New York newspapers, drawn from the exact month the scene takes place. ( Jay and Sara exempted only one kind of paper prop from this fastidious approach: Pamphlets that might end up falling into the audience were filled with nonsense strings of Latin words so as not to distract audience members from watching the show.)

The candles onstage are real wax, because nothing else looks like wax. The seals on the letters by Washington and Hamilton are real wax as well. Each man gets his own personalized seal. Asking Jay why even the tiniest, least visible props deserve this kind of attention is like asking a hawk why he flaps his wings so much. Five seconds pass before he replies, “‘Cause it has to be.” He thinks it’s unfair to ask actors to go onstage and expose themselves with anything less than what he calls “ultimate support.” Tommy agrees, regarding a personalized wax seal as just as vital to the show’s reality as a piece of scenery. “The only people who see it are the actors. But the actors see it.”

Here again the creators of Hamilton are channeling their subject. The inexhaustible Hamilton didn’t just organize an army for the new United States, and propose a system of ranks and units for commanding it, he also designed its uniforms, fussing over details as minuscule as the color of George Washington’s buttons and his plume (yellow and white, respectively).

Six days became five and then four. Because Hamilton was completely sung-through, it was almost completely danced-through. So no matter what else was happening during tech, Andy Blankenbuehler was on his feet, rushing onstage to give a note, rushing back to see how it was playing. Woe to anybody who happened to be in his way: Andy wasn’t rude or angry–he smiled a lot, all things considered–but he simply didn’t notice any human form between him and the dancers executing his combinations.

The stress on him was enormous. He didn’t find it unusual. “I’m kind of always at the same state. A state of general exhaustion. Because my brain never stops. My brain runs at a very fast pace. Pretty much always, I think. I work out constantly, I never sit around, even at home I’m doing my own yard work. I go to the gym every day, I’m warming up all the time, I’m working all the time. I don’t sleep enough.”

Lin admired this work ethic, and learned from it. On Andy’s 45th birthday, in 2015, he tweeted a little tribute to his choreographer: “Happy birthday to Andy Blankenbuehler! You guys know that when I’m playing Hamilton, I’m really just playing him, right? RELENTLESSGENIUS” In “Non-Stop,” Lin very explicitly asks what makes a genius relentless, what turns a gifted individual into a monster of creativity. The Act One finale covers six furiously productive years in Hamilton’s life, from his return to war-ravaged New York City in 1783 to his ascension to Washington’s cabinet in 1789. It rips through 12 scenes in six minutes, and staging it demands the same kind of ingenuity that it describes. Luckily, Andy has the same creative metabolism as Lac. “Twelve ideas for every one we can use,” in Lin’s estimation.

“What’s interesting about Non-Stop’ is: the venom I feel,” says Andy.

“The venom?”

“That oomph, that vitality. Just keep going until you figure it out.”

Andy developed his relentlessness early, and, like Alexander Hamilton, he developed it out of necessity. He moved to New York in 1990 with no job and no contacts, just a determination to dance. (He had grown up in Cincinnati, where his father did community theater, and where nobody could figure out why young Andy worked so hard, or moved so well.) He landed a few Broadway gigs, but got tired of doing step-touch step-touch in the back row–he wanted to tell stories that mattered. So he started choreographing his own dances, which taught him, to his surprise, “I didn’t know anything about what I was doing.” He could put together some steps, sure, but what about analyzing a story, or crafting a two-hour arc, or running a meeting, or keeping himself in shape? He flailed.

When In the Heights came around, he knew he had to choreograph the salsa-and-hip-hop show, even though–as he admitted to Tommy and Jeffrey–he didn’t know anything about salsa or hip-hop. They thought he had a knack for telling stories, so they hired him anyway. To prepare for the show, he moved to Los Angeles, took four hip-hop classes a day, soaked up the rhythm of salsa, and devised a hybrid style of his own. It won him a Tony Award.

For Hamilton, he needed another new vocabulary. Beyond several varieties of hip-hop dance, you can see little traces of Gene Kelly and Justin Timberlake in the result. When Andy himself dances it, you see a lot of Jerome Robbins. But the movement of Hamilton, in its totality, reaches far beyond conventional dance steps, of any tradition. Andy devised a language of what he calls “stylized heightened gesture.” It includes everything from the way a chair is moved, to how a shoulder pops, to the bows at the curtain call.

“Other choreographers build portraits,” explains Stephanie Klemons, dance captain and associate choreographer. “Andy’s experience is like a 3-D Imax fresco.” Andy knew the audience wouldn’t consciously register a lot of his choices–like the fact that Burr moves in straight lines, because he sees no options, and Hamilton moves in arcs, because he sees all possibilities–but that wasn’t the point. “There are very few times when I really want the audience to look at dance,” he says. “Dance is just meant to be a framing device that matches emotionally what I want the audience to feel.”

In a way, choreographers are like the architects of financial systems: They have to sense how a little change here will shift a balance over there. They need microscopic focus on a macroscopic scale. During tech, Andy would cut across the crowded stage, adjust a performer’s elbow, and cross back to the audience, never losing his stride, or breaking his train of thought. f o u r b e c a m e t h r e e b e c a m e t w o .

Once you’ve spent a full week in a darkened theater, it begins to seem more real than the real world. You’re certainly spending more of your waking hours there than with your loved ones. “It’s a great amount of sacrifice for every person here,” says Chris Jackson, who called this tech week the most grueling of his career. “You’ve gotta say no a lot. You’ve gotta say bye a lot.”

The hours were long, but that doesn’t mean they were dull. Learning Andy’s choreography had challenged the cast members when they first encountered it in the rehearsal room. When they finally got onstage for those precious eight days of tech, they had to learn it again. Because now the stage was spinning.

At his first meeting with Tommy, David Korins had proposed using a turntable, a rotating circle at center stage. If the floor spun, it would add energy and motion to the action. It would create more possibilities for the hurricane, the duel, even the evocation of street life in New York. “You can move people magically,” he says.

Tommy didn’t go for the idea. He’d used a turntable before, in a show that Korins designed, and didn’t think Hamilton would need one. The May 2014 workshop–the one at the 52nd Street Project, that left people cheering and crying and pleading to invest–seemed to confirm his instinct. Still, that summer, Korins had raised the possibility one more time. And this time,Tommy thought maybe Korins was onto something. So did Andy. So did Lin, for whom turntables always conjure fond memories of the first musical he ever saw. “They have one turntable,” he says of Les Misérables. “We have two.”

Seeing the two-part turntable installed and spinning at the Public, Andy was delighted with all the subtle effects it could create: Counterclockwise motion, he felt, suggested the passage of time; clockwise suggested resistance to the inevitable. Up on stage, on top of the thing, the actors tried to execute Andy’s steps while being carried in two directions. Stephanie watched “the cast’s brains melting out of their ears.” She spent the week feeling nauseous.

Andy felt the same urgency as everybody else, but the all-consuming demands of tech also gave him a kind of respite. The entire time that he was choreographing Hamilton, his five-year-old daughter, Sofia, had been undergoing chemotherapy. She had endured more than two grueling years of treatment by the time he went into tech. Her cancer diagnosis had led Andy and his wife, Elly, to upend their lives.”We stopped living for tomorrow and started living for today,” he says. They had sold their apartment, he had given up his office, they had bought the shell of a brownstone in Harlem, they had moved in with her family in Brooklyn. Almost all of the combinations that proved so taxing to some of the best dancers in New York, the patterns that whirl around the turntable and overflow the stage, Andy had developed alone, on the concrete floor of his mother-in-law’s house in Bay Ridge, under a ceiling so low he could reach up and touch it. He would help put Sofia and her brother to bed, open a bottle of wine, head downstairs, and work long into the night, on the part of his life that he could control.

“It was just like the show,” he says of that ordeal. “I was living the show. It was a sacrifice that needs to be made. I need to fight for this.” Looking back now, he sees that he was “choreographing myself in the show.”The way that the 19 actors moved on the Newman stage was, in some ways, a reflection of what one man was suffering, particularly the anguish that awaits Alexander and Eliza in Act Two.

“I’m not making it up,” Andy says of the movement that he devised for the cast as the Hamiltons are plunged into despair. He knew what it was like “when someone you love is dying and they’re in your arms.”

Two days became one became zero.

On January 20, 2015, the Mission Control tables were packed away, the aisles swept, the stage mopped, and the lobby doors propped open. The company did only one complete run of the show before the first audience arrived, but it was a complete run all the same. They had brought Hamilton to the stage in time for its world premiere.

The crowd that night came away asking a question that has grown more insistent with time: How did they do it? You can ask it of those eight days in January. You can ask it of the seven-year development of the show. If you feel like being deep, you can ask it just as profitably of what happened in the years depicted in “Non-Stop,” when the victorious rebels had to learn how to govern themselves. These things unfolded on very different scales, obviously. Still they each tell a story of something unprecedented and implausible becoming real. And they all suggest the same answer.

Alexander Hamilton was indispensable to the infant republic, as Lin dramatizes. But you could say the same about Washington, Madison, and half a dozen other founders. It’s possible that some of them could have won the war without the others, but would they have ratified the Constitution? And vice-versa. The Founding Fathers did the impossible twice in 10 years because they did it together: supporting, inspiring, challenging, and correcting each other.

Hamilton is Lin’s show to an extent that almost no Broadway musical in living memory is one person’s show: idea, story, music, lyrics, lead performance. But it’s impossible to imagine it working without his core group of collaborators. In those frenetic days in January–and across those long years leading up to the Broadway opening night–he depended on what he calls his Cabinet: Tommy, Andy, and Lac. “Our shorthand is very short,” says Tommy. It needed to be.

“Non-stop” ends with a whirl of virtuosity. Lin and Lac pile up two melodies, then three, then four, and Andy puts the whole company and even part of Korins’s set in motion. The reason why Lin can call this sequence a “colonial clusterfuck” without suggesting that it’s a problem that needs to be solved is Tommy. No matter how hyperactive things got onstage, or how stressful the time crunch became, Tommy kept everybody clicking along. In fact, for all the stress of tech, the Newman came to feel (in its quiet moments, anyway) like a model society in miniature: a bunch of very talented people who knew their jobs and did them, giving their best in the service of a worthy common goal. It takes all kinds to make a revolution.

At that first preview, it was disorienting to watch more than 200 strangers stream into the theater, hailing from God-knows-where. They didn’t know they were obstructing what had very recently been Andy’s path to the stage, or occupying the spot where Tommy liked to preside, arms crossed, a couple of fingers to his lips. But as Alexander Hamilton kept trying to tell us, even the best-ordered societies need infusions of new blood to thrive. Keep it in mind the next time you go to the theater: Some gifted men and women have built a community in that room, and the immigrant is you.